LITMIR.BIZ

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the cast-off wreckage of the USNA’s Periphery, specifically in the Manhattan Ruins. Squatties in the Periphery didn’t have access to the high-tech toys of full citizens, like cerebral implants and Net access, and they didn’t have the social entitlements—like medical care—of citizens either. That had been why he’d agreed to join the service: to pay for the med service when Angela had had her stroke.

      Cut off from the social mainstream, Prims also had a completely different take on society. The garbage that passed for art and music, the truly bizarre fashions both in clothing and in body, the spoiled and pampered decadence of ordinary citizens, all of those were so far beyond the ken of Prims struggling just to survive within the old and flooded coastal city ruins that there seemed to be no point to social contact at all.

      One major difference had been the mainstream’s attitude toward sex—casual, recreational, and often with little or no emotional commitment. In the Ruins it was different. Couples paired for life, a survival strategy in an environment where one hunter-gatherer partner watched the other’s back.

      Throughout much of the human population, now, the mainstream view held that monogamous pairings—“monogies”—represented an archaic and flawed twist in human behavior. A few religious sects still required monogamous sexual relationships, while a few—the NeoMorms and fundamentalist Muslims, especially—allowed polygamy, but not the reverse, polyandry.

      Damn. He’d not wanted to make Rissa angry.

      Maybe when the Skipper came back and took over the squadron again. Or maybe someone else would be transferred in. Squadron CO was a commander’s billet; Gray wouldn’t even be looking at a promotion to lieutenant commander for another four years or so, and commander was a good four or five years after that, generally.

      And maybe he should just forget about having a private life at all. There were always sex feeds, downloaded through your implants. Virtual sex was as good nowadays as the real thing. …

      What Gray missed, he knew, was not the physical release so much as the companionship, the closeness, the belonging. When you were a part of a closely bonded pair …

      Damn it all to hell. …

      Standing, he took his tray to the mess deck entrance and tossed it and his half-eaten lunch into the converter. The Dragonfires were due to go on duty in another six hours, flying CAP just in case the Europeans went back on the hastily organized truce.

      He wondered if the problem with Rissa was going to screw the flight scheds.

       CIC

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Kuiper Belt, HD 157950

       98 light years from Earth

       1530 hours, TFT

      “Message in from the Illustrious, Admiral.”

      “Thank you.”

      Koenig opened the channel, and Harrison’s face appeared, grinning. “Good afternoon, Admiral,” he said. “Thought you’d like to hear the news.”

      “What news is that, Ron?”

      “Some of us have finished up with our council of war. Looks like Admiral Giraurd is going to be going home by his lonesome.”

      “Really?”

      Harrison nodded. “Illustrious, Warspite, and Conqueror were with you from the get-go. You knew that.”

      “I did. And thank you.”

      “Don’t mention it. I’m just glad to get that weasel Coleman off my ship. She smells a lot better now that he’s gone.”

      Willard Coleman had been the Confederation political officer on board the Illustrious, a civilian reporting to Hans Westerwelle on the Jeanne d’Arc, and tasked with keeping an eye on the loyalties of Confederation officers in the British squadron.

      “In any case, we’ve been talking with the other commanders in the Pan-European squadron,” Harrison continued. “Except for the Jeanne d’Arc, they’re with us. Captain Michel, on the Arc, would have been too … but old Giraurd does need a way to get back home.”

      “Good God. …”

      “Don’t know about the Chinese, yet,” he went on. “But you can count on the rest of us. Nineteen ships, including two light carriers.”

      “And that,” Koenig replied, “is the best news I’ve heard all day. Welcome aboard.”

      He didn’t bring up the problems this decision would make for the various ship captains. They knew.

      That they were willing to join Koenig’s career suicide, however, spoke volumes about how other naval officers viewed the Confederation …

      … and what to do about the alien Sh’daar.

      Chapter Five

       29 June 2405

       Admiral’s Office

      TC/USNA CVS America

       Approaching Texaghu Resch System

       112 light years from Earth

       1002 hours, TFT

      Seventy-four days after departing the refueling rendezvous within the Kuiper Belt of HD 157950, a total of fifty-eight ships tunneled through the Void within their Alcubierre bubbles, their AIs holding them on course for a star invisible from Earth. Admiral Koenig sat in his office, reviewing again the electronic files of the ships and crews that had joined CBG-18.

      In fact, only seventeen of the Pan-European Federation ships had joined the battlegroup, not the nineteen Harrison had promised. As it turned out, Captain Michel and the Jeanne d’Arc had voted to join the squadron, a surprise last-moment mutiny that had thrown the European contingent into considerable disarray. The crews of three European ships—the destroyers Karlsruhe and Audace, and the heavy cruiser De Grasse—had voted not to join CBG-18, and returned to Sol. Admiral Giraurd had left on board the De Grasse, along with the political officers and a number of other men and women who’d chosen to adhere to Confederation Navy orders. Those three ships were crowded. A number of the officers and crew of the remaining Federation ships had elected to return to Earth as well, while some on board the three had transferred to vessels remaining with the battlegroup.

      Four of the nine Chinese ships had returned to Earth as well. Five, however, under the command of Admiral Liu Zhu, had elected to join America and CBG-18. Koenig wasn’t sure, yet, if that represented Hegemon approval of his strategy … or if Beijing, independent of the Confederation, was simply determined to keep an eye on him.

      Fifty-eight ships, then—more than twice the number surviving after Alphekka—were about to emerge at Texaghu Resch, and Koenig needed to have a long-anticipated conversation with the two nonhuman beings on board the star carrier America.

      “Admiral,” Koenig’s personal electronic secretary said, “the two Agletsch are here to see you, as you requested.”

      “Thank you. Send them in.”

      The office door opened, and the aliens walked in, followed by a Marine guard.

      Humans called them “bugs” or “spiders,” though they were, of course, unrelated to anything that had ever lived on Earth. Flattened and slightly elongated disk-shapes on sixteen slender, jointed legs, each stood as tall as a short human but took up considerably more space. Instead of chitin, their integuments were red-brown, soft, almost velvety, with blue and yellow markings like the reticulated patterns of some snakes. Legs and what passed for faces were black; four eyes on stalks emerged from each face, and Koenig was only now beginning to realize that the movements of the eye stalks added emphasis

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